A Second Chance
by The Orphanim
Summary: Everyone makes mistakes, but not everyone gets a chance to fix them. This ghost is one of the lucky few.


Legend of Dragoon and all its characters are owned by Sony.

_**Second Chances**_

Usually when something important happens to someone, they can tell you, in stark detail, every nuance of the event itself. Often times they can fill out that description with a dozen meaningless tidbits as well. It seemed to him remarkable, then, that he couldn't remember any details about the moments leading up to the present. What he felt just then was beyond explanation, even physical sensations seemed inaccurate. It wasn't wasn't especially hot, nor too cold. There wasn't a loud crash of noise, no hand pushing at his shoulder, nothing to wake him up, but Inexplicably, that was the feeling he had. This was an awakening, he was coming around from an extremely good nap.

There weren't many things to see there in that pit. At this depth, the darkness swallowed almost all details, and the smooth brown stone surrounding him was unremarkable scenery anwyay. For a long time, only one thing stood out to him in any detail. That was the calling. If asked to describe it, he wouldn't have been able to. It was just noise. It was the wind in the trees and the gurgling of a small stream. It was the sound of insects in the forest at night, the falling rain. It was the beat of a heart. Somehow it was all of these things. Yet it had a meaning that was so fundamentally clear to him that he couldn't imagine another interpretation. There wasn't one. It was a siren song that beckoned all to a familiar place they had never been.

Mayfil.

Everyone felt it when their time came. This just meant that his had. Dwelling on it didn't seem too important, for some reason, what the ghost knew was that he should go. Like a compass swinging towards north, he turned to orient himself to the sound of the call. Mayfil was so far away that he wouldn't have been able to see it no matter how high up he was, but he still knew beyond doubt what direction it was in.

And when he turned, for the first time, he became aware of the a pile of white, glinting solemnly in the featureless dark. It was so completely incongruous with the blandness of the chasm that he had to notice it. As he approached it took shape, scratching out the outline of a man in the gloom. The man wore intricate white armor, scarred from battle, battered from the fall. The man had platinum hair, but it was sticky with blood and matted to his skull. The man didn't move.

The man was him.

Memories flooded his consciousness. The ghost remembered the day he received that armor from 'Emperor Diaz' at the ruins of Kadessa. The armor was ancient, dating back to the Dragon Campaign itself, and reserved for the most powerful warriors in their society. He remembered what it felt like to wear the armor into battle with his enemies. A few annoying flies who had dogged his heals acrossed the entire continent.

A few annoying flies who had been right.

That armor had been a gift, along with his sword of fire. "If anyone can create our utopia," Diaz had told him, "it's you..."

"...Lloyd," the ghost finished the thought aloud. And there was suddenly something more important than the calling. His hand balled into a fist. Diaz lied, betrayed him, and used his intentions to build godhood for himself.

Lloyd knew just one thing, he could not die with the wrong god still around.

----

A slightly less ambitious project than my other one. This idea's been kicking around in my head for years.

The funny thing is that I never thought that much of Lloyd. Just another generic badass, and frankly, Rose took him pretty hard in the badass department. Then this fun little revelation hit me. Shirley said that if something unresolved binds you strongly enough to life, Mayfil won't drag you in. And Lloyd said "I can't die with the wrong god still around." His last moments have a few things in common with the Dragoon ghosts in Vellweb as well. For some reason, it all clicked together that the obvious answer was that Lloyd didn't die on the moon, he died in Vellweb. His passion for his mission transcended death itself, and what you see on the moon is his ghost making its last stand.

I like Lloyd a lot more now.


End file.
